Wanderfoot Part 22

"_Qu'est ce qu'il y a, madame?_" she cried. Val pointed to the meat lying in the dust.

"Take that and give it to a dog."

"But yes, madame; thank you, madame."

Smiling all over, she picked up the meat and dusted it carefully. They saw very well she did not mean to give it to a dog.

"It is not fit for human food," stammered Val, still shaking.

"But no, madame; thank you, madame."

She smiled and looked at it with fond eyes. Val could have struck her.

On the _Terra.s.se_ Haidee said:

"Val, how could you? It will be all over the town. Even the cure will know."

Val did not answer. Her rage expended, she was wondering what her Brannie was going to have for dinner the next day. Two great tears stole down her face.

When Haidee came back from eight o'clock Ma.s.s the next morning she noticed many of the villagers standing about in groups. They were evidently discussing some affair of great interest, but their grave and serious voices subsided into whispers at the sight of her, and while she pa.s.sed a dead silence prevailed in each group. However, in front of Lemonier's shop an old beldame lifted her voice in the manner of a prophetess and gave forth the dark saying that "it was to be hoped that people who threw good meat to dogs would never live to feel the pangs of hunger!"

Haidee repeated this at home as a great joke, but was sorry she did, for Val turned pale as a condemned criminal, and her eyes searched the faces of both children as if for the outward signs of an inward gnawing at their vitals--but so far both looked plump and composed.

She spent the whole morning juggling with six eggs and a pint of milk, the result being an exceedingly wobbly-looking baked custard which appeared to supplement the meagre midday repast. At the sight of it Bran nearly lost his appet.i.te for the potatoes baked in their jackets which his soul loved, and when pudding-time came he began to squirm and declare he was not hungry. With the name of Bran he appeared to have also inherited that great king's primitive tastes in food, for he cared for nothing except milk, oatmeal porridge, and potatoes with b.u.t.ter.

"Do eat some, Brannie," pleaded the pale and guilty Val. "I made it specially for you. It is lovely."

"Yes, I can see it is lovely," said Brannie, politely, edging away from the table. "But it smells like a p.u.s.s.y cat just after she has been drinking milk."

When Hortense arrived to wash up she reported that the two brothers of the _bonne_ at the Cafe Rosetta were in the village, having been summoned from Cherbourg by telegraph to come and lunch with their sister on a shoulder of Premiere Communion lamb.

The confirmation ceremony was most grand. It was the first time so important a personage as an Archbishop had visited Mascaret, and the villagers, sensible of the honour done them, were inclined to forgive the cure his imagined misdeeds for having arranged it. Not only were all the Premier Communion candidates from other villages present, but a great many of the summer visitors had arrived, and it was an enormous congregation that waited in the stuffy church. The Archbishop's train was late, but at last he came from the sacristy very crumpled and tired-looking in his gold and purple robes, and walking with faltering feet, for his years were heavy on him and he was weary with travelling.

Everything about him seemed old, from the rich lace on his aube to his gentle blue eyes, which looked as though they saw visions of far-off places--everything but the small and wonderful white teeth in his sunken gentle mouth. His stole was beautifully painted with lilies, and his mitre of s.h.i.+ning white and gold most splendid, but sometimes during the long service his head drooped a little under it and rested on his breast. There was such a weariness about him that Val was glad when she heard a few months later that he had laid aside his heavy and elaborate gold and white panoply of office and gone to rest. He had about twelve priests with him, keen, able-looking men, of a very different type to the simple cures who were herding their flocks from the surrounding villages, and they cl.u.s.tered about him as though to keep the eyes of the world from resting too long upon this venerable representative of the Pope. The _Vicaire-General_, a splendid looking man with an eagle eye and a strong beaked nose, surveyed the church as a general might the field of battle, while the congregation chanted the Benedictus Dominus.

It seemed to Val that when his eye rested on her he saw deep down into her heart and had no pity for her failures, being of the Napoleonic brand of man who has no use for any but the strong ones of earth.

After the Archbishop with crumpled crooked fingers had given his solemn benediction to the people, singing in a trembling yet wonderfully thrilling old voice,

"Sit nomen benedictum ... Adjutorium Domini ... Benedicat vos omnipotens Deus Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus,"

he sat down just inside the chancel rails, and talkingly questioned the children on their catechism. Most of them were too shy to distinguish themselves much, though the son of the village milkman, an ugly cross-eyed boy, acquitted himself manfully. Later the Archbishop rested in his chair, his chin on his breast, seeming to sleep, while priests prowled and hovered round him. The Mascaret cure darted about the church giving instructions, and presently the children broke shrilly into the popular hymn:

"Je suis chretien, voila ma gloire, Mon esperance et mon soutien, Mon chant d'amour et de victoire, Je suis chretien! Je suis chretien!"

The village boys loved this hymn. It lent itself to much l.u.s.ty shouting in the last two lines of the chorus, and they delighted in it, pa.s.sing winks to each other as they hurled it from their lungs with something of the same ardour as had served for the "_mujik de churie_." But later when they filed in long lines to where the old Archbishop sat waiting for them, their mien changed. No one could be vicious or violent before that beautiful tired presence waiting with white trembling hands to bless them. They came quietly, one by one, and knelt on the velvet cus.h.i.+on at his feet, the boys bashful and cloddish in their best smocks, the girls wearing the elaborate and top-heavy mob cap of silk and muslins and ribbons that it is the Normandy peasant woman's pride to perch above her harsh features. Haidee, in a white hemst.i.tched muslin frock with a flounce of delicate lace round its edge, walked among them like some woodland sylph escaped from a Corot picture. Her long legs clad in white silk stockings and sandals created something of a scandal amongst the peasant mothers, whose ideas of decency bid them cover up the legs of their girls with the longest and heaviest skirts they can afford. Her headgear, too, was considered characteristic of the madness with which G.o.d had afflicted the occupants of Villa Duval, for it was a tulle veil bound about her brow by a wreath of real daisies, gathered and twined by Val and Bran.

Each child carried a tiny slip of paper on which was written the new name which must be a.s.sumed at confirmation as in baptism. This paper was handed to a priest who stood on the left of the Archbishop and who, glancing swiftly at it, transposed it into Latin and murmured it into the great prelate's ear. Haidee, who had chosen Joan, was astonished to hear the Archbishop thus address her:

"Joanna! I mark thee with the sign of the Cross, and I confirm thee _par le chreme du salut_, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost." Then he gave her a little tap on the left cheek and held out his ring to her; she kissed it fervently and went away uplifted. In pa.s.sing back a priest on the right stopped her and wiped away the holy chrism (composed of balm and oil) with a piece of cotton wool, which he let fall into a basket held by a choir boy whose blue eyes vaguely disturbed Haidee's saintly dream. A little farther on another priest intercepted her and wiped her forehead once more, none too gently she thought, with a rather dissipated-looking napkin. The cowboy look came over her face at that, and Val reflected that it was just as well there were no more priests to waylay her before she reached her seat, for that Wild-West scowl was often followed by acts which made up in vigour for what they lacked in dignity.

Val was not able to see the end of the ceremony, for just as the priests closed in on the Archbishop, one with a gilt bowl, another with soap and broidered towel, another to take his ring, Bran whispered to her in a panting whisper:

"Mammie! I 've got the gasps!"

There was nothing for it but retreat to the churchyard, for when Bran got "the gasps" the only cure for them was air and solitude. It was a nervous affliction which often seized him when he was deeply bored or, curiously enough, when he was intensely excited, making him gasp like a chicken with the pip, and Val would feel her heart come into her throat with every opening of his little beak. While he regained his breathing powers in the churchyard, she sat on a stone watching him, thinking how she would have liked the hands of the Archbishop on his precious head too. There was surely some special benediction in such delicate old hands; and though she asked no blessings for herself, she wanted them all for Garrett Westenra's son. And while she sat there musing, out of the sacristy door came the Archbishop himself. He, too, seemed afflicted with gasps, for his mouth opened and closed and his breath came in little pants. None of his priests were with him, only the village cure escorting him to the presbytery, and he seemed somewhat like a child escaped for a moment from his nurses. When he saw Bran's smiling face his own lit up and its weariness was for an instant wiped away.

"A little American Catholic," said the cure, but the old prelate had not waited for an introduction before making the sign of the Cross over Bran's bright head. Val knelt in the dust while the faltering feet pa.s.sed by. She felt as though a star had fallen from heaven for her.

CHAPTER XVI

THE WAYS OF GIRLS

"Il n'est pas de rose a.s.sez tendre Sur la palette du printemps, Madame, pour oser pretendre Lutter contre vos dix-sept ans."

GAUTIER.

"Did you see the people from Villa Shai-poo?" asked Haidee, as they walked home.

"No, which were they?" Val was away in a land of her own peopling and her eyes were vague.

"An awfully distinguished old man, with a little white goatee and nice American-looking boots; and two boys...." She stopped abruptly. Val's attention was attracted.

"What kind of boys?"

"Oh, well! I didn't notice them much. You know all French boys look as if they wear stays. I dare say these are n't so bad though. Hortense says the eldest is in a regiment _tres chic_. The other one failed for the navy last year." Her manner was meant to suggest pointed indifference.

"They must be more than boys."

"The one with the greeny-blue eyes is twenty-four and the one with dark blue ones is nineteen and a half," responded Haidee. Val smiled at this artless testimony of her "indifference."

They were pa.s.sing Shai-poo at the moment; a big, square, roomy-looking house, with those solid grey walls that stand for centuries and are so typical of Normandy, surrounded by a s.p.a.cious garden full of the charm of careless grace--groups of trees, flowering gra.s.ses, little forests of tall bamboos, beds of brilliant flowers that looked as if they had sprung up by happy accident, winding paths, and a tea-house in the form of a Chinese paG.o.da. A great mainmast rooted from the bowels of a French war-s.h.i.+p of old type was erected in a clear open s.p.a.ce that lay almost like a deck around it. From its top lazily floated a silk flag embroidered with the Chinese Royal arms.

"Their grandfather the Admiral must have arrived," said Haidee excitedly. "They only put up that flag for him--it is the one he took in the battle of Shai-poo. That is the mast of his old s.h.i.+p."

"Goodness, Haidee! what a lot you know about them! Who is the man with the goatee and the American boots then?"

"Oh, that's the father of Sacha, the one in the army. The other boy, Rupert, is a cousin and an orphan."

"Oh!" Val pondered these things in her heart. It was plain that Haidee was growing up, and beginning to take an interest in other things than hens and rabbits! Evidently too she had been listening to Hortense's gossip. Val felt guilty somehow, and wished wistfully that poor Haidee could have the society and companions.h.i.+p of a girl of her own age and world.

When they got home they found that John the Baptist had left some letters. One of them was from Harriott Kesteven, asking if Val would mind very much if she came to Mascaret for the summer months, bringing her girl Kitty. It seemed almost like an answer to Val's wish for society for Haidee.

Her only doubt was as to Westenra. Would this, even though he never knew or cared, be treachery to him--a last fire made of the blackened embers of a burnt boat?